Using Contribute Publishing Server with Contribute

Using Contribute Publishing Server (CPS) with Contribute creates a powerful solution for managing and maintaining your website.

CPS is a J2EE-based server application that lets you centrally manage large groups of Contribute users. CPS includes the following services:

User Directory service

Is a user management solution that lets you integrate Contribute with your organization’s user directory to easily manage and authenticate users.

E-mail Notification service

Lets you automatically notify users about changes to web pages in the draft review process.

Log service

Lets you monitor website activity so that you can easily troubleshoot problems.

CPS also has two other services that you can extend to meet your needs or use as they are:

Simple File Deployment service

Enables you to easily move files from a staging or testing server to a live server.

RSS Activity Feed service

Produces a syndication feed that lists changes that occur in any folder on your website.

The biggest advantage to using CPS is the ability to integrate your organization’s user directory services (such as LDAP or Active Directory) with Contribute. This gives you individual control over which user is granted access to a particular website and the role to which they are assigned.

Consider a large organization with several decentralized websites. In addition to a public-facing site that provides information about the organization, several internal sites are in use by individual departments and workgroups. The organization uses LDAP as both a directory service that lets users look up other employees as well as an authentication service through which administrators set permissions that limit users’ access to file-sharing servers and other network resources.

Unlike sites that don’t use CPS to manage users, when a user logs in to a CPS website, the User Directory service retrieves the connection information associated with that user, and provides access to the sites that the administrator assigned. By maintaining site connection information in the User Directory, administrators can add or remove access to websites without having to resend connection information.

This example provides a partial listing of employees from an organization’s user directory. The employees, their workgroup affiliations, and the sites they can access are listed in the following table:

User	Workgroup	Websites
John Lydon	Product Management	Sales, Production, Marketing
Malcolm McClaren	Product Management	Sales, Production, Marketing
Martin Atkins	Marketing	Marketing
Keith Levine	Sales	Sales
John Savage	Production	Production
Laura Logic	Web Design	Sales, Production, Marketing
Jah Wobble	Contribute Administrator	Sales, Production, Marketing

Although this user list is oversimplified, it demonstrates one possible scenario for the way that users within an organization might be assigned access to websites. This scenario divides users according to their role within the organization, and assumes that they have full editing and publishing privileges in their respective sites. Certain users have access to all the sites. For example, the product managers, John Lydon and Malcolm McClaren, work with all the teams in developing and launching products, and need to contribute to all the sites.

Likewise, web designer Laura Logic and Contribute administrator Jah Wobble have access to all sites. As the web designer, Laura provides templates that are easy to add content to and that fit the needs of users collaborating internally. The templates she maintains include those for taking meeting minutes, for scheduling, and for providing product specifications, marketing launch plans, and sales projections, to name a few. Laura also collaborates with Jah Wobble, the Contribute administrator, to help determine the editing and publishing privileges for individual users and roles.

CPS integrates with the organization’s LDAP service, which authenticates user access to various network resources. In this case, the LDAP authentication is the first step in granting access to websites hosted on various servers within the organization. The Contribute roles further define user privileges in a website, determining the degree to which users can modify pages in the site.